The invention relates to data forwarding in a routing architecture.
A typical router has to process both packets that need to be forwarded and control packets to compute routing table. When a router forwards data, it looks up a destination IP (internet protocol) address in a routing table. The route lookup is a time consuming process and limits the performance of the single-box component. Other forwarding operations that limit the performance include validating a header checksum, decrementing a time-to-live, and recalculating and updating the header checksum. Checksum is a sum of a group of data items used for error checking. Time-to-live refers to time before a packet of data is deleted or discarded.